"Tree, Stone, Eye" | Student Images from Taos
Before I left for Taos to teach the opening classes at the Mabel Dodge Luhan House, I was pushing against the inertia of our long, long sequester. I felt the uncertainty that had grown in many of us about going into the world. I felt the reluctance to move. The poem below made me smile:
My head was heavy, heavy;
so was the atmosphere.
I had to ask two times
before my hand would scratch my ear.
I thought I should be out
and doing! The grass, for one thing,
needed mowing.
— from “Inertia,” a poem by Jane Kenyon
Now I have returned from a few weeks in New Mexico, teaching the classes that had been postponed for almost two years. We were the only ones at the retreat, and the classes were small. The landscape was beautiful, christened with desert showers and new blooming flowers. Everyone had been through something significant in our long period of sequester. There was rejoicing — the fresh newness of being together in a room. This rejoicing was helped along by spectacular food, made by our chef, Sophia, and her team — and good wine.
I began, as always, with the conviction that each student who shows up has a particular gift, and is in class to enliven and strengthen that gift — the seed they were given at birth. Everyone is born with a gift. I believe, and am privileged to witness, that the making of art for its own sake will “bring into realization the self most centrally yours” (William Stafford).
Fishing the River
The land is like poetry: it is inexplicably coherent, it is transcendent in its meaning, and it has the power to elevate a consideration of human life.
— Barry Lopez
Anyone who has spent time in the desert, watching and listening, has felt the sense of depth and presence that defies the initial barren glance. I have taken many road trips to the New Mexico desert, and what follows is a true story of one I took years ago, headed toward Ghost Ranch.
Fishing the River
I am almost to the New Mexico border where the sign says, in big red letters, "You Are Leaving Colorado." Further down the road there's a second sign: “Welcome to New Mexico, The Land of Enchantment.” I have always wondered about that place between the two signs. It is some kind of demios oneiron, a village of dreams, that does not exist on any map.
Highway 17 is a rural mountain road circling above the Chama River. I have traveled it countless times on my way to teach at Ghost Ranch (named by the Spanish as a place of witches, “Ranchos de los Brujos”). This route is marked by reminders of our mortality. Rural New Mexican byways are decorated with descansos, a pastoral cross with flowers, honoring the resting place of one who has died on the road. Often I have stopped when seeing an old cemetery guarded by iron gates and filled with plastic roses and small figurines of the Virgin Mary. The gravestones have old writing and engravings of crosses, of which I have made many rubbings. New Mexican graveyards are distinct — flavored with Native American and Mexican roots. Mary is represented as the Virgin of Guadalupe, "a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars." There are many stories of The Virgin of Guadalupe, going back to the 1500’s. She symbolizes the bridge between heaven and earth.
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Workshops: Exploring line with ink, paint, thread, graphite and poetry
We began with the idea, expressed in many traditions, that we are each born with a seed, an acorn, a particular something that we have to offer back to this world that has been given to us. The clue to what this is, as Joseph Campbell has said, is this question: What did you do as a child that gave you a sense of timelessness? Even if this doesn’t directly answer what your “seed” is, it is the thread for you to follow. Here is the same idea posed by an Italian born, German priest, Romano Guardini, talking about his dream:
Last night, but probably it was the morning, when dreams come, one then came to me. What happened in it I no longer know, but something was said, either to me or by me, which also I no longer know.
So, it was said that when a man is born, a word is given with him, and it was important, what the meaning was: not just a predisposition, but a word. It is spoken unto him in his essence, and it is like the password of everything, what then will happen. It is at once the strength and the weakness. It is the commission and the promise. It is the guard and the dangers. Everything that will then happen through the course of the years is the effect of this word, it is the explanation and the fulfillment. And everything comes to pass for him to whom it was pronounced -- each man, to each to which one was spoken -- he understands it and it comes into agreement with him. –Romano Guardini